Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
loved all the reality shows, the awfulness of them—the cruel elimi­
nation rounds, the role-switching with calamitous consequences,
and the makeovers of people with missing teeth, bad hair, and reces­
sive chins. He glanced toward the television. Oh, why not? Pabulum
was better than the conscious pain of despair. He walked over to the
happy side of the camp.
In the blackness of the jungle, the screen was bright as a beacon.
He saw the female host of Darwin’s Fittest in her same safari hat and
dirt-stained khakis of two weeks or so ago. This time, she had art­
fully applied a swath of mud to her left cheekbone. The two teams of
contestants were building canoes, carving them out of balsa wood.
Their clothes were transparent with sweat, which left, as Bennie
noted, no bulge or droop or crease unhidden. He could see that the
fittest, whose bodies were fat-free specimens of healthy living, were
detested by the others, as they should be.
“Are you ready?” the safari-hatted woman said. “Today’s new
challenge . . .” And she told them that holes would be punched into
their canoes’ hulls, to simulate an attack by a hippopotamus, and
they would have to plug these leaks with any material they could
find, hope it held fast, then paddle one hundred meters upstream,
where they could obtain the fresh water and food necessary to sus­
tain them for the next three days. “If you don’t make it,” she warned,
“you’re literally and figuratively sunk.” She gave a rundown on the
voracious creatures that lay in wait in the waters—rib-crunching
crocodiles, flesh-nibbling fish, poisonous swimming snakes, and the
most dangerous creature of them all, the people-hating hippos. The
camera zoomed in on each contestant’s face, and captured the fast-
blinking eyes of the fearful, the pressed lips of the determined, the
slack jaws of those who already knew they were doomed.
Bennie empathized with their fears and public humiliation. When
they scratched at an itch, he did, too. When they swallowed in hor­
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